Piecing Together the Green Burial Movement

Green burials — the long-ago practice of laying loved ones to rest in biodegradable wooden caskets or shrouds, without embalming — are gaining in popularity. The movement is made up of a diverse coalition: environmentalists, historic preservationists, and folks looking to cut costs — and all looking for options not offered within the traditional funeral industry.

Story by Olivia Milloway | Photos by Stephen Cook

After nearly 20 months of his chemotherapy, Kharmin Beam didn’t want to put any more chemicals in her husband’s body. When he died of brain cancer at the age of 44, Shane’s unembalmed body was laid to rest in an oak coffin, buried 3 feet under and covered with a mound of dirt 3 feet high. Shane’s body will slowly decompose over several years and the land will subside and eventually level out.

Mourners, including Beam’s two sons, who were 13 and 15 at the time, left dozens of handwritten messages on his casket, including “God bless you for your impact on our family” in a slanted scrawl and “Thank you Shane” in elegant cursive. “We will miss you Coach Shane,” stood out from the rest in a child’s round and uneven lettering.

Beam thought it was important for all the visitors, especially the children who came, to have the opportunity to leave personal messages for her husband. Her voice thick with emotion, Beam recalled, “A lot of kids had a hard time with it, trying to understand it, and they felt sorry for my boys. I think them being able to put something, whatever they wanted, on the casket was very much important for them to be a part of it and feel like they helped do something.”

Shane was buried at Honey Creek Woodlands, a preserve in Conyers, Georgia, that contains over 1,000 acres of protected wetlands, streams, and native hardwood forests. Beam chose Honey Creek as Shane’s final resting place not only because of its overwhelming peacefulness but because she feels close to her husband while biking Honey Creek’s trails. “We loved mountain biking. Whenever we had a date without the kids, that’s what we did,” she said with a chuckle. 

Honey Creek Woodlands in Conyers, Georgia, contains more than 1,000 acres of protected wetlands, streams, and native hardwood forests. The Chapel at the Hill Top provides a space for families to gather for outdoor services.

Though Honey Creek is a cemetery, you won’t find a monoculture lawn and upright rows of headstones lined up like a chessboard. Rather, imagine a half-finished game of Chinese checkers; graves are tucked around trees, nestled into hillsides, and marked with engraved natural stones laid flush to the ground. Honey Creek Woodlands is a green cemetery: a place where services don’t feature expensive caskets, vaults, or headstones. At green cemeteries, green burials are the norm, with unembalmed bodies are either shrouded in cloth or placed in caskets made of biodegradable materials.

Beam’s in-laws were initially hesitant about the idea of a nontraditional funeral, but it was important to her that Shane be buried naturally. “I think we, as humans, automatically don’t like things we don’t understand,” Beam said, “and I think they had a hard time wrapping their brains around what it would actually be like.” She had to answer a few questions to change their minds: No, decomposing bodies don’t smell; no, animals don’t dig up graves; yes, he’ll have a headstone that you can come visit. Her father-in-law, once opposed to the idea of burying his son at a green cemetery, has visited Honey Creek every Wednesday since his son has been there, often weeding his grave.

Kharmin Beam recalled of Shane’s interment, “It was one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever seen. If you can call burials beautiful.” An anonymous donor paid for all the funeral and burial costs and also gave Beam funds to purchase a plot next to her husband’s. Eventually, she’ll be laid to rest alongside Shane with the bobcats, butterflies, and birds.

What we now call green burials were the default in America prior to the Civil War and the resulting invention and popularization of embalming. Before the mid-1800s, deceased white folks were washed and dressed by the women of the house and laid to rest in shrouds and handmade caskets on family property. Non-landowners were buried on church grounds or in the town commons. Except for the burial itself, the entire process took place within the home and didn’t involve morticians or funeral directors — occupations that didn’t exist at the time. 

In the case of Black folks in the antebellum South, owners of enslaved persons took deliberate steps to impede religious or cultural traditions as a means of control. Moreover, written records of daily life during that time were generally personal diaries of the owners, who rarely wrote about the enslaved’s burial services. Despite a lack of written records, death was everywhere among enslaved Black people and especially prevalent among children. One study estimates that 90% of enslaved Black children died before the age of 16 in coastal South Carolina and Georgia forced labor camps.

The burial services of enslaved Black folks often included long processions, song, and prayer after dusk, presumably to allow for enslaved people from neighboring plantations to attend. Burial grounds were placed on marginal property — rocky, tree-filled thickets that would otherwise be too difficult to clear for farming — to protect them. In Gullah Geechee tradition, graves were marked with shells; in other places graves were marked with stone or wood slabs. Cedar or yucca plants were also used as grave markers to symbolize the life that persists even in the face of death, a tradition that can be traced back to Haiti, where African and Christian beliefs mixed.

During the Civil War, as soldiers died on battlefields in droves, American burial traditions fundamentally changed. Even if wealthy families could afford shipping their boys home for burial in the family plot, their bodies couldn’t last the long train ride without decomposition. Enter experimental embalming procedures. Pioneering physicians would commandeer barns and sheds near the battlefields, sometimes even erecting their own tents, to practice embalming techniques on fallen soldiers, and would charge families up to $100 per body. It’s estimated that during the Civil War, out of the 600,000 soldiers who were killed, 40,000 were embalmed. While there is not much documentation, it’s likely that all embalmed soldiers were white. Black soldiers were either buried in Black cemeteries near where they died or buried in segregated portions of white cemeteries; it wasn’t until 1948 that Arlington National Cemetery was integrated. 

If the Civil War gave doctors the opportunity to tinker with embalming, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln created a market for it. Lincoln’s cross-country funeral procession passed through small towns and cities alike en route to his home in Springfield, Illinois. In order to keep his body fresh for the trip, he was embalmed at each stop. When Americans flocked to see his casket, they were shocked to see such lifelike facial features on their slain president.

Since then, the U.S. funeral industry has ballooned to a $20 billion-per-year behemoth, with employment opportunities as morticians, funeral directors, casket manufacturers, transport teams, and many other specialized positions. If you die in America in this century, odds are you’ll be embalmed by a traditional funeral home so that your body can be preserved for future viewing. “Embalming is a simple exchange of fluids,” said Cy Hume, president, manager, and part owner of A.S. Turner & Sons Funeral Home and Crematory in Decatur, Georgia. Bodily fluids and internal organs are taken out, and preserving chemicals are pumped in. 

Hume gave me a tour of A.S. Turner & Sons, including an embalming room with an original midcentury porcelain embalming table and green-tiled walls and floors the color of faded surgical scrubs. Hume explained that although it’s an exact science, embalming has an art to it, as well. “Let’s use you as an example,” Hume said, as he reached toward a shelf filled with rows of plastic bottles full of bright pink, green, and orange liquids. He continued to describe what colorful cocktail he’d push back into my veins based on my height, weight, age, and skin tone to most effectively preserve me for a viewing ceremony.

Despite the cultural dominance of the modern funeral industry, the more traditional way of death and dying has resurfaced in popularity in the last few decades. Established in 1996, Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, South Carolina, was the nation’s first green cemetery. Billy Campbell, a practicing physician (and yes, he’s heard jokes comparing him to the veterinarian who’s also a taxidermist), and his wife, Kimberly, spearheaded the modern American green burial movement that has now spread across the country. 

Kimberly Campbell noted the complicated and segmented nature of the traditional funeral industry. “Death is like a jigsaw puzzle; it’s not one picture, there are all these different parts that you put together. You’ve got the dying and the death part, then you’ve got the care of the body,” she explained. “So for a lot of people, they get this end part of being buried in nature, but it’s about figuring out the logistics and plan of how we get here. I think that’s one of the big humps to get people over, because we’ve lost the skill of taking care of our own dead.”

Like Beam, Kimberly Campbell finds comfort in the physical and emotional involvement and intimacy that green burials provide. Of traditional burials, she explained, “It’s the machine that lowers you in, it’s the artificial grass, it’s the sealed caskets, it’s all of that. And so people don’t get to touch or do, and they’re all directed. But when people can make caskets for their father, or their brother, or their child, their child, the work that goes into that is healing in itself.”

Though its popularity might convince you otherwise, routine embalming isn’t required by law in any state — though some require embalming or refrigeration if the body isn’t buried within a certain time. Many religions, including Islam and Judaism, don’t allow embalming except under a few special circumstances, and it’s not a popular practice outside of North America. Wendy Eidson, founder and owner of Phoenix Funeral Services in Conyers, calls the embalming process “barbaric” and said that when her clients come to her, they often don’t know that there are alternative options to embalming or cremation. Eidson, along with her team of five employees, including her mother and daughter, work closely with Honey Creek Woodlands. Roughly one-third of all their services — about 115 burials a year — take place at the preserve, including, in 2017, her son-in-law Shane’s interment. The rest are more typical services at traditional cemeteries. 

Wendy Eidson, founder and owner of Phoenix Funeral Services, kneels by a stone grave marker at Honey Creek Woodlands.

While there are as many reasons to choose a green burial as there are people who choose one, Eidson credits the increasing popularity of green burials to younger, savvier consumers entering the market. She described baby boomers as the “Cremation Generation.” According to the National Funeral Directors Association’s (NFDA) 2021 Cremation and Burial Report, last year’s cremation rate was projected to be 57.5% and the burial rate only 36.6%. In the same report, 55.7% of people said they would be interested in exploring green funeral options. Eidson sees younger generations as being turned off by the superfluous opulence of traditional funerals. In Eidson’s experience, Gen Xers and millennials tend to invest in experiences rather than traditional rites.

Burial vaults, caskets, and embalming costs for traditional funerals can quickly add up. According to the NFDA, the median American funeral in 2021 cost $7,848, which includes embalming, transportation and preparation of the body, viewing services, a casket, and a vault.

Traditional cemeteries are often required by law to use costly burial vaults that keep toxic embalming fluids from leaking into the groundwater supply. Such vaults aren’t allowed in green cemeteries, where bodies naturally decompose, become soil, and have their nutrients recycled into the nature preserve after a handful of years. Eidson noted, “If you look at it, you kinda live forever; it’s the circle of life.”

Eidson calls herself a disruption to the “creepy, pale-skinned, soft-spoken, mob-boss-looking weirdos” that you’d imagine hovering behind the front doors of typical funeral parlors. She hates dressing up and wears blue jeans, cowboy boots, and colorful blouses to her services to make her clients feel at ease — unless her clients prefer professional wear, in which case she’ll break out her black pumps and pantsuit. 

After becoming a single mom in high school (who still graduated at the top of her class), Eidson went into the food service industry, attending culinary school for training in French traditional cuisine and Viennese pastry. After about a decade, though, she wanted to pursue a different path and become an OB/GYN. While she was in the midst of her course work, her sister called, needing Eidson to take care of her two children. “Something had to give: my job, my school, or being a mama. I picked school,” she explained. 

Eidson eventually returned to the culinary industry, catering lavish events. But after the financial crash in 2008, extra cash dwindled and business dried up. The recession gave her the chance to change careers and go back to school, so she enrolled at Gupton-Jones College of Funeral Service in Decatur. Though the transition from pastry chef to funeral director seems unlikely, to Eidson, it made perfect sense. “If there’s two things I know, it’s the funeral business and food: humility and servitude.”

A major influence that drove Eidson to offer nontraditional funeral services lies in her own experiences with the funeral industry. In the wake of her father’s death when she was 19, her family was guilted by local funeral homes into spending money on a lavish service to show that they really cared about her father. “They had us backed in a corner, and there wasn’t a whole lot of educating on choices that went on at the time. It was just, ‘You have to do this, this, and this.’”

In Eidson’s memory, the funeral directors were “creepy, sad, and somber,” and left her to figure out her father’s financial and legal affairs alone after the check was paid. Eidson decided there must be another way to help families, so she personally answers a 24-hour call line for past, current, or future clients to help manage the logistics of dealing with hospital bills and estate sales. “I’m going to be there to pick you up and carry you to where you need to be when you don’t know the difference between night and day. Just ’cause we buried your mama doesn’t mean we’re done here,” Eidson said.

Eidson’s buried a Pulitzer Prize winner, relatives of Atlanta celebrities, Holocaust survivors, and bodies shipped from 45 states. But in a male-dominated industry, Eidson said, “I have to work twice as fast and be twice as smart just to stand toe to toe with my [male] colleagues.” Though more women have been joining the field in recent years, the 2016 U.S. Census Bureau reported that only 26% of all funeral directors and morticians nationwide are women. According to Eidson’s count, Phoenix Funeral Services is one of only a handful of female-owned-and-operated funeral homes in Georgia.

Her attitude toward her clients and embrace of progressive death care has positioned her as an industry outsider. “I’ve scratched my little niche out — not that I care what anyone else thinks except the families I serve,” said Eidson. Narinder Bazen, a death midwife in Atlanta, sees Eidson’s position as an outsider as the key to her success. As a death midwife, Bazen guides her clients through the transition from life to death and educates on home funerals, in which the body stays in the family home for intimate visitations and services. After her role is complete, she often sends her clients to Eidson for burial or cremation services.

When Bazen started her practice in 2015 and approached male funeral directors for business collaborations, she recounted that “the men would talk down to me and rudely push me out of their offices.” Funeral homes make their revenue from funeral and memorial services, not burials, so home funerals threaten to eat at their bottom line. But her experience with Eidson was different. Rather than scoffing, Eidson embraces Bazen’s clients. Bazen credits this open-mindedness to the woman-centered nature of her family business, allowing a new perspective to an industry that has remained relatively unchanged in a century. “Wendy doesn’t bend or break the law, but she’ll do whatever her clients need for their healing,” said Bazen. 

Eidson’s compassion extends to her mother-centered approach for caring for stillborn babies. She’ll wait patiently — sometimes for hours if need be — for parents to be ready to part with their child, bringing along a teddy bear so that the parents have something to cradle when their baby is gone. When she enters the delivery ward or NICU, Eidson always refers to the infant by his or her full name, never “your child” or “the baby.” As a mother herself, Eidson knows a grieving mother wouldn’t want to give her baby away to a man with a body bag, so she uses an infant’s car seat instead. Once the parents have said goodbye, Eidson waits until she’s out of sight of the parents to cover the small body in the car seat with a blanket. The parents’ last view of their child as she leaves the room is a peaceful one, as if their child is sleeping. 

Though Eidson is gentle, Bazen emphasized, she’s not meek. “If you have the pleasure of meeting Eidson, you can see it in her stature — she’s a fucking badass.” 

Jim Bell, founder and owner of Milton Fields Natural Burial Ground in Milton, Georgia, has an origin story similar to Eidson’s; he was inspired to join the green burial movement in part because of his own experiences. “When my parents died, we made every mistake in the book,” he said, citing superfluous costs. At Milton Fields, burial plots in his green cemetery are less expensive than what you’ll typically find at a traditional cemetery. A single space ranges from $1,995 to $2,195, while the average cost of a burial plot in Georgia is $3,375. Families can also buy double or quad spaces for cheaper rates, similar to most traditional cemeteries. According to Bell, when he opened Milton Fields in 2011, it was one of fewer than 20 green cemeteries nationwide, and the only one in Georgia besides Honey Creek Woodlands. Now that number has grown to more than 300.

Though they’re both green cemeteries, Milton Fields doesn’t look much like Honey Creek Woodlands. At around 17 acres of rolling meadow, Milton Fields sits in the backyard of the historic Nix-Bell House in Fulton County. Bell moved to Milton in 1976 to restore the 1896 single-pen farmhouse, which, with its white four-board fence, looks and feels like a scene out of a Faulkner tale. The house, painted white with a green metal roof over two triangular gable dormers, has a quaint porch full of rocking chairs and a marker from the Milton Historical Society. To the side of the house, opposite the cemetery, horses roam on a tract of land Bell leases. 

This historic feel was part of the design, said Bell. He founded Milton Fields about a decade ago as a way to protect his land from development even after he was gone after reading Mark Harris’ book, Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.

Through Milton Fields, Bell can provide green burial services to families and protect the historic value of the property through a perpetual care trust. Perpetual care trusts, which are required by law in Georgia, are funds cemeteries amass to cover graveside maintenance into the future. In the state of Georgia, all new cemeteries must start with a $10,000 seed deposit in their perpetual care trust, then 15% of all plot sales are required to be saved in the trust.

Green burials are much more environmentally friendly compared with embalming and cremation. According to Columbia University’s DeathLAB, more than 800,000 gallons of toxic embalming fluids — which include known carcinogens like formaldehyde — threaten groundwater supplies and are at risk of leaching into the soil. The eco-friendly nature of green burials is what drew George Horrigan, a consultant from Alpharetta, Georgia, to Milton Fields. He and his wife recently bought a plot for themselves. “We’ve always been avid environmentalists; to us, it didn’t make sense why our last presence on the Earth would be one of harm.”

The opportunities for environmental conservation drove the Campbells to found Ramsey Creek Preserve as well. “For me,” said Kimberly Campbell, “with all the burials we do, the ones with the shroud burials where they’ve been tended to by somebody that loved them, it’s such a completely elegant and simple way to say to the Earth, ‘Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me. Now here I am; now you use me to improve the health of this area.’ And that’s where the bigger conservation element comes in.” The Campbells prefer to use the term “conservation burial ground” as opposed to “green cemetery,” as it highlights the ultimate goal.

The Campbells have sold about half of the 1,500 plots on the initial 36 acres of their conservation burial ground. A recent purchase of an additional 38 acres, now protected by a conservation easement, will extend the ecological impact of their preservation. At Milton Fields, Bell has sold about 700 plots in the past 11 years, about half of which are currently filled. The other half are part of advance directives.

Bell opened Milton Fields in 2011; he’s sold about 700 plots so far.

Whispering Hills Memorial Nature Preserve in LaGrange, Georgia, is the third green cemetery in the state. About an hour’s drive from Atlanta and less than 20 minutes from the Alabama line, Whispering Hills sits on 140 acres of horse pasture and terraced forests that haven’t been farmed since the 1950s. Ralph Howard Jr. and his sister, Jean, grew up on the property, which has been in the family since 1946. After inheriting a piece of land when their parents passed away, the siblings needed to figure out what to do with it. 

About four years ago, Ralph Howard was considering clear-cutting the property to sell the timber until he came across an article about green burials in The Economist. “I read that article and thought, maybe that’s a better thing to do. Maybe we could preserve it by starting a green cemetery,” Howard recounted to me at Whispering Hills’ grand opening ceremony on Earth Day 2021. The Campbells have mentored Howard and his team at Whispering Hills, providing consultations on how to properly dig, place, and prepare graves without disrupting native plants.

Whispering Hills Memorial Nature Preserve in LaGrange, Georgia, sits on 140 acres of horse pasture and terraced forests. Owner Ralph Howard Jr. (pictured above with Whispering Hills employees Jackie Hubbard (center) and Sam Breyfogle) grew up on the land and decided to open a green cemetery after reading an article about the movement.

Despite recent successes in the green burial movement, advocates in Georgia haven’t always been welcomed with open arms. In 2009, two years before Bell opened Milton Fields, Elizabeth Collins tried to open a green cemetery in Macon, Georgia, but was shut down by Macon-Bibb County commissioners who passed a resolution that called for a “leak-proof casket or vault.” The community leaders cited residents’ concerns about groundwater contamination. Though toxic embalming fluids do threaten groundwater supplies in some areas, research shows that unembalmed bodies pose no public health risk. 

In Howard’s case, the Troup County Board of Commissioners denied his request to designate 143 acres for cemetery use, instead approving only 20. “There [were] misunderstandings about green cemeteries. People used to think it was some sort of voodoo thing, or something,” Howard said with a laugh. He’s satisfied with 20 acres for the time being and plans to ask for more in 2024, when their tax easement is due for renewal. Consumers in LaGrange have been slow to warm to the idea of green burials, too; after almost a year of operation, Whispering Hills has facilitated only one natural burial and a handful of cremains scatterings, though 17 advance-directive plots have been bought. 

My mother has always said that funerals are more for the living than the dead, but for most of my life, I didn’t agree with her. I could never understand how the traditional services for my grandmother, my high school classmate, and my childhood best friend’s mother were meant for us. I often felt like we were performing the same scripted grief over and over, memorializing a past we couldn’t return to and mourning a future we’d never see. 

After witnessing one of Eidson’s services at Honey Creek, I saw the wisdom in my mother’s words. Each green burial is a promise to the living — a promise that is kept every day the sun rises and trees grow. When I die, I want to make this promise. I want to be buried in a green cemetery with an outdoor service. I want a tulip poplar casket with a bouquet of irises and magnolias and for Dolly Parton’s “Wildflowers” to play while my family lowers me into my grave. I want to donate my carbon and nitrogen to a tree that might someday be a jungle gym for a bored grandchild being dragged along for a visit. 

As for Eidson, she doesn’t want her hair to be brushed or makeup to be put on her, or “any of that nonsense.” Though she loves the serenity of Honey Creek, she will be buried, unembalmed and wrapped in a quilt made by her great-grandmother, in a family plot in the mountains of North Carolina. Ralph Howard has picked a place to be buried in the forest that was once his childhood playground, and he has already marked the plot with his name. While Billy Campbell has a plot picked out at Ramsey Creek, Kimberly Campbell wants part of her cremains to rest in South Carolina and the other part back home in England. Jim Bell, on the other hand, has plans to be buried in Milton Fields, on the property where he’s lived for well over half his life. I asked if he had picked out a plot yet, and with a huff he replied, “That one, farthest, in the corner. Damn near worst plot in the whole field.”

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